Wednesday 26 January 2000 12.41 EST
First published on Wednesday 26 January 2000 12.41 EST

Zadie Smith appears to be keeping her feet on the ground - and in earthy Willesden too - but heaven knows how. Her debut novel, White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99) has received an astonishing chorus of praise. Smith, a 24-year-old just out of Cambridge, had been given a £250,000 advance and hailed as "the new Salman Rushdie" by her publisher. "For once", said the usually testy Hugo Barnacle in the Sunday Times, "here is a Big New Literary Find that hasn't been oversold."

That was echoed everywhere. "Hamish Hamilton's publicists have made much of the fact that Smith is herself part of this entrepreneurial, multicultural Britain - she is young, she is half-Jamaican and she wrote the novel in quiet moments while revising for finals at Cambridge," wrote Melissa Denes in the Daily Telegraph. "But it would not matter if she were a he, white and the wrong side of 40: Smith can write. Her novel has energy, pace, humour and fully formed characters; it is blissfully free of the introversion and self-conscious detail that mar many first novels. Smith has stories to tell and, in the tradition of Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie, she just gets on with them; the dialogue is pitch-perfect, the comedy neat and underplayed."

Denes had a half-hearted quibble: "There is a false climax that attempts to unite far too many characters and storylines: here Smith is only spelling out themes - about family and belonging and history - already implicit in the narrative. And there is something too pat (and too punning) in the conclusion that we should not perpetuate 'the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect'." But, she concluded, "these are small weaknesses in what is a bounding, vibrant, richly imagined and thoroughly engaging whole."

Those much-mentioned Hamish Hamilton publicists will have no shortage of encomia for the paperback. "The 'mongrel' nation that is Britain is still struggling to find a way to stare into the mirror and accept the ebb and flow of history that has produced this fortuitously diverse condition and its concomitant pain," wrote Caryl Phillips weightily in the Observer. "Zadie Smith's first novel is an audaciously assured contribution to this process of staring into the mirror. Her narrator is deeply self-conscious, so much so that one can almost hear the crisp echo of Salman Rushdie's footsteps. However, her wit, her breadth of vision and her ambition are of her own making. The plot is rich, at times dizzyingly so, but White Teeth squares up to the two questions which gnaw at the very roots of our modern condition: Who are we? Why are we here?"

It wasn't easy for critics to explain what this dizzying book was actually about. Detailing plotlines is the bane of fiction reviewing; boiled down to 300 words, plots sound confusing or ludicrous or, more often, both. Phillips had a lengthy go, but it defeated him. "This multi-layered, deeply-plotted novel resists easy categorisation, which is precisely the author's point." (And a useful get-out clause for reviewers.)

So, epic serio-comic saga following the fortunes of two families from Bangladesh and Jamaica who have fetched up in the melting pot that is Willesden will have to do plot-wise. Too much detail just gets in the way. Maya Jaggi's more lateral approach in the Guardian certainly made the book sound engaging: "Its characters embrace Jehovah's Witnesses, halal butchers, eugenicists, animal-rights activists and a group of Muslim militants who labour under the unfortunate acronym KEVIN." I'd buy that.

Jaggi picked up on the symbolism of the final image: "the escape of a small brown laboratory mouse, which may be genetically programmed to turn albino-white, but which gladly seizes its freedom and runs with it". That freedom - along with greater tolerance and a sense of a society increasingly at ease with itself - was mentioned elsewhere: "Her attitude to the complications and conflicts, loves and hates that inevitably result from living in a cultural melting pot is not only post-imperial but post-racial," wrote Anne Chisholm in the Sunday Telegraph. "One of the endearing qualities of her sharp-eyed but warm-hearted book is that it makes racism appear not only ugly and stupid but ludicrously out of date, like the politician referred to as 'E. Knock someone or other'."

A "post-racial society" is a controversial notion and could have been mined more: there are plenty of people who would disagree with that description of Britain and it would be interesting to hear their view of Smith's "warm-hearted" novel. Smith herself, in an interview in the Observer, hinted that she was keen not to be seen as a writer of baggy, generous, all-life-is-here novels. "When I was little, we'd go on holiday to Devon, and there, if you're black and you go into a sweetshop, for instance, everyone turns and looks at you. So my instinct as a child was always to over-compensate by trying to behave three times as well as every other child in the shop, so they knew I wasn't going to take anything or hurt anyone. I think that instinct has spilled over into my writing in some ways, which is not something I like very much or want to continue."

There was one less than ecstatic review, in the literary magazine Butterfly. "This kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford et al), she would just stay still and shut up. White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old." The review, according to Sam Wallace in the Daily Telegraph, was written by Smith herself.